Thomas Jefferson; A Life

New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, 1993. First Edition [stated], Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xix, [3], 708, [6] pages. Minor wear and soiling. Includes Acknowledgments, Introduction, Key to Abbreviations in Notes and Bibliography, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Topics include: I Cannot Live Without Books; I am Surrounded With Enemies; A More Universal Acquaintance; I Was Bold in the Pursuit of Knowledge; An Untiring Spirit of Investigation; All Men Are Born Free; The Pursuit of Happiness; God Gave Us Liberty; Let Those Flatter Who Fear; I Speak the Sentiments of America; An Expression of the American Mind; With a Single Eye to Reason; It is not in My Power to do Anything; I Tremble for My country; I Do Love This People; A Situation Much More Pleasing; My Head and My Heart; A Master of My Own Secret: The Blessings of Self-Government; The Empire of Liberty; and A Fire Bell in the Night. Willard Sterne Randall is an American historian and author who specializes in biographies related to the American colonial period and the American Revolution. He teaches American history at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. This authoritative, single-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson captures the public and private man as well as the tumultuous age in which he lived. Throughout the narrative, with stories of Jefferson's earliest youth in colonial Virginia to his tragic final days at Monticello, we encounter a dynamic man committed to a search for a meaningful and authentic way of life. In addition to the author's scholarship and the detective work on the Jefferson papers at Princeton University, the author calls on his skills as an investigative journalist to unearth new material. Derived from a Kirkus review: In the 250th anniversary year of Jefferson's birth, Randall offers a brilliant, magisterial, and gracefully narrated biography of the sage of Monticello. Randall argues that much Jeffersonian scholarship relies on misinterpretations of the Founding Father's writings, or even ignores the bulk of his voluminous papers. By drawing on this newly assembled (at Princeton University) trove, Randall makes significant reinterpretations of important, though often overlooked, periods in Jefferson's life. He contends that Jefferson's underexamined early years as a law student under legal scholar George Wythe and as a preeminent member of the colonial Virginia bar, together with his encyclopedic mastery of the works of the French philosophers, explain his emergence as the chief legal spokesman of the Thirteen Colonies. Jefferson became Virginia's leading expert on land law, largely as a result of his frequent legal challenges to titles of landed gentry, and, eventually, he fundamentally rewrote that law. His interest in land law led also to his becoming a strong proponent of westward expansion, both while ending the Revolution (the Paris peace treaty doubled American territory) and during his presidency, through the Louisiana Purchase. Randall also views Jefferson's years in Europe as significant preparation for his formulating foreign policy as President, and he argues convincingly that Jefferson's antislavery views were sincere (despite his status as a major Virginia slaveholder, he worked throughout his life to bring an end to slavery in Virginia, beginning with an emancipation measure-which was shouted down-that he'd helped introduce in 1769 in Virginia's colonial legislature). Throughout the text, Jefferson emerges as a person in whom Enlightenment rationalism battled with powerful passions, both in affairs of the heart and matters of state. A superlative contribution to Jeffersonian scholarship that rebuts some canards in recent literature (Fawn Brodie's sensational allegations about the President's personal life receive short shrift) while revealing the tensions latent in Jefferson's complex personality.